


It's Always Albuquerque

by allcanadiangirl (andchimeras)



Category: Everwood
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2003-06-23
Updated: 2003-06-23
Packaged: 2017-10-08 08:11:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,898
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/74509
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/andchimeras/pseuds/allcanadiangirl
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"When things go bad for Laynie Hart, she comes back to Everwood and does something stupid and smalltown."</p>
            </blockquote>





	It's Always Albuquerque

**Author's Note:**

  * For [researchminion](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=researchminion).



Usually, when things go bad for Laynie Hart she shoves her way back into her parents' house and holes up for two weeks.

Usually that's what she does. Usually she locks herself in her bedroom and speaks in irritated monosyllables through the door when her mother tries to feed her. When her father tries to tell her they'd like to take her out to a movie.

This time. This time Bright is standing on the corner of Pine and Clover, carrying two plastic bags overflowing with vegetables. He knows Laynie's routine of failure as well as anybody in this small, vine-twisted town. He even knows the two things about it nobody else knows.

One thing is that while she is in her room she doesn't sleep on the bed. She always sleeps on the floor.

The other thing is that she always calls Amy on the second day.

Bright doesn't know why she does these things, only that she does. She sleeps on the floor and she calls her sister-in-law. Which is strange, both of these things are strange. Because Laynie's floor is hardwood, and because Amy has not been her friend during normal times since eighth grade.

These are things she does when she fucks up.

It has been happening more frequently the last two or three years. The first time was her junior year of college, Amy said she'd slept with her faculty advisor and the woman's husband found out. He was, basically, really really pissed off. So Laynie wrote her fall exams and roared into Everwood on a Yamaha road bike.

She was not back for Christmas. She wasn't back for New Year's. She locked herself in her room for six days. She did not come down when the house was full of family, she did not open the door for Colin and a turkey sandwich.

Amy said that she called on the second day and they talked for nearly three hours. They didn't talk about the engagement, they didn't talk about Amy's grad school woes, they didn't talk about anything normal, Amy said. Laynie told her the whole story of the closeted faculty advisor and the inevitable drunken husband fallout, said she'd never done anything with a girl before but it was nice and she might do it again some time, and Laynie said to tell Colin hi. On the twenty-seventh she left, as loudly and as suddenly as she came.

Laynie doesn't come back to be in Everwood. She comes back, Amy thinks and Bright agrees, to be where no one can find her. She comes back to hide from the people she's pissed off, screwed over, or disappointed.

She comes back to the people who don't matter to her.

This time, Bright is about to cross the street after leaving Mrs. Fowler's organic yard market, and Laynie passes him in a lime green Mustang. He looks after her for a moment, certain he was mistaken because she was just here six months ago (frontman of her biggest band overdosed on heroin and had to cancel the tour—ten million dollars lost like spit in a lake). He shrugs and steps onto the pavement.

Screaming tires and the scent of burnt rubber, he is confronted with a blur of sparkling green and her suddenly stationary face. The car is low, lower even than most cars seem to him, and she has her left wrist draped over the steering wheel, a long pale arm resting in the open window. She looks up at him, hair shiny and curled and short and dark, black sunglasses. Smile that's so successful and confident—he remembers when she wouldn't smile because of braces and how he and Colin tickled her until she cried—it takes him a second to see the sadness on her cheekbones.

"Hey there, meathead," she says, pushing her sunglasses up. "Want a ride?"

The shuttered angry loneliness in her eyes. Very familiar eyes, not just because he's known her since he was eight, but because they are just like Colin's eyes. Only brown.

He only lives two blocks away, but this is really something, Laynie talking to someone besides Amy. He shrugs. "Sure."

Her smile turns from saleswoman to old friend and she laughs. "Don't sound so excited." He hears the locks click back and he goes around the hood of the car.

He thinks it's probably a bad sign that his shoulders nearly get stuck when he's putting his vegetables in the back, but he's willing to be uncomfortable because the sandy leather seats look very soft and Laynie is not exactly grinning at him anymore. It's a little smile, like she doesn't think he can see her looking. Her head leaned back on her hand, elbow propped up on the door.

He squeezes in and takes a deep breath before closing the door, packing himself into the bucket seat. Laynie shoves the car back into drive before he has a chance to put his seatbelt on. He straps it over his chest and lap anyway. Safety, safety, he thinks. Always be as safe as possible when in a car with someone who's not entirely sane. He hunches down so his head doesn't hit the roof quite so hard on the potholes.

He opens his mouth to tell her to turn right at Bakely, but she says, "How's tricks?"

So he says, "Huh?"

She laughs again, and he thinks she probably should have been calling him on the second day all these years, because Amy could never make Laynie laugh just by being her own slow self.

"How are you?" she says slowly. "What's up? Who won the greased pig chase at the County Fair?"

"Uh," he says. He shrugs again. "I'm pretty good, I guess." The price of lumber is up, he thinks, and Cap Ripley won a year's supply of canned baked beans for holding on to that pig for almost a whole minute. Fifth year in a row. Bright's legs are folded in places he's pretty sure they shouldn't be able to fold, and he tries to stretch out a little.

"Mmm," Laynie says. "Here." She pushes a button and the seat under him slides back smoothly.

He rotates his right ankle, sitting almost like a normal person. "Thanks."

They're approaching Maple Grove, and he thinks for a moment she's going to drop him at his parents' house. Why she would do that he's not sure, Amy must have told her he has his own place now.

Then they pass Maple Grove and he wonders what the hell is going on, what the fuck he's gotten himself into. The rule before always wearing a seatbelt when in a car with someone who's a little out of it is. Basically. Don't get in a car with someone whom you're pretty sure is nuts at least half of the time she's around. Period.

"Where, uh, Laynie," he says, he is cut off as she slams the car into second gear and twists left off of Clover onto Elgin.

Laynie says, "There was a concert in Brussels the other night."

Bright looks at her, then out the window at the passing houses, unsure what to say, pretty much totally confused. "Okay?"

"It was a popfest, just junky prefab bands, but it was big, you know?"

Not really. "Uh. Yeah."

Bright grabs the door frame as they spin ninety degrees and start heading down Marsh Drive. "Jesus," he says.

Laynie laughs a little, kind of bitter.

"I promoted it," she says. "I mean, the company I work for promoted it. I headed the account, though, it was my thing."

He wonders what went wrong, when she's going to get around to telling him. Why she isn't lying on the floor in her bedroom.

She turns very slowly onto Dover, drifts into her parents' empty driveway. She cuts the engine. Her hands are clutched around the top of the steering wheel, she rests her forehead on her knuckles. She is wearing a very short skirt, Bright notices, it rides high on her thighs. He remembers watching her on the cheer squad the year before the accident. "There was a crush," she says. "Six kids were killed."

Bright looks up from her skin to her profile against the wheel. "Jesus," he says again. "Laynie."

"I've been thinking," she says. "I don't think I'm very good at this." He wonders what she means. Driving, her job. Life, maybe. He has no idea. Her thoughts have always been so much deeper and faster and broader than his. "I think." She takes a breath and he can see a tear rolling quickly and quicker down her face. It drips from her chin.

"I think I'm going to give it up. I think this is what I'll do. I'll open a restaurant in Albuquerque."

That's the other thing, Bright remembers. The third thing. Whenever she gets thrown down, she talks about giving up and opening a restaurant in Albuquerque.

"Why?" he says. And he means why Albuquerque, he always asks Amy why it's Albuquerque and she always shrugs with a confused smile, it's always Albuquerque.

But Laynie heaves another breath, crying for real now. "I don't know," she says. "I just. I can never. Jesus Christ."

She is wearing a white sleeveless shirt, and her shoulders shake, grey shadows across her back. He can see the pitted trail of her spine as she leans forward against the steering wheel. He takes off his seatbelt and leans across the car to her. She knocks over into him when his fingers have barely touched her arm. Her hands slide from the wheel, one onto his thigh, the other around his back. Her hand tucks under his shirt and into the waist of his jeans.

"Hey," he says, not quite a yelp but surprised certainly. She laughs, voice broken, into his chest and pushes him back. He hits the door of the car, his head and shoulders out the window.

By necessity he pulls a leg up and lays it over the console, into the driver's side leg well. Either that or pull his interstitial muscles, and that would not be good for his coaching duties. She straddles him, her skirt hiked up almost into a belt, one foot braced beside his on the floor.

She grabs the mostly useless handle above the door and leans down to him. She presses her shiny red mouth against his, he can't stifle a bit of a gasp when she pries his lips open and shoves her tongue between his teeth.

Smooth, sweet, buttery, faint carbonated fizz and tang.

What the fuck, he thinks fuzzily when she snaps away, yanks the handle to open her door. She slides out ass first, barely touching him. He watches her hands tug her skirt down, smooth it over her hips. She walks away, he looks out the windshield at her going up the steps to the front door. He can't give her anything but a dumbfounded look, and he's well-aware that he probably looks like a complete moron, hanging out of the car window with lipstick all over his face.

She sighs, pulls her sunglasses off. "Come on," she says. "You're such a moron sometimes."

In the bare minute it takes him to twist himself upright and open the door, he's decided this is a dream, no, real, no, a dream about sixteen times. Nightmare, he thinks, looking at his hand gently shaking as he pushes the car door shut. Nightmare only because the first time he thought about this Laynie was, like, thirteen.

The peonies beside the walk blur, pink and purple into white, he sees only Laynie's ass and the long smooth curves of her legs. Shoeless. He blinks. Driving a stickshift Mustang without shoes.

She's kind of crazy, he realises. It had only been a joke before, but he watches her go into the house and he follows, she tosses her sunglasses and her keys on the hall table, she pulls her shirt over her head and throws it away, no bra, she's on her way up the stairs, unzipping her skirt, it falls, she steps out, it tumbles back towards him, and he's entirely sure she's kind of crazy.

He steps over the stair where the skirt landed, as if it might grab his foot and toss him down to a broken-necked death.

He is outside her bedroom door. He has only been in her bedroom three times. Playing doctor, panty raid, panty raid. Steve once said it was kind of weird for Colin to raid his sister's underwear drawer, but Colin was the one providing the opportunity to touch women's undergarments, so. The weirdness was never mentioned again.

The room is, like, bright white and blinding, he knows it's just because of the exposure and the white linen blinds and the white walls and the white princess dressing table. Laynie walks across the rectangle of the doorway. Her body, so pale but not white, not nearly, and her hair like something more poetic than a raisin. Less concrete than a fingerprint.

Walking in, the cotton diffusion of light hardens. Turns the vision into a bedroom with off-white wood floor and little girl furniture and a very naked not at all little probably five-foot-six woman standing by the window, a hand around the back of her neck. Facing away from him.

She comes around and comes to him, pulls his jacket down his arms and off, pulls his t-shirt over his head. Dark dark eyes and her mouth is so much redder without the lipstick, she puts her hands on his head and pulls him down.

It is a dream, she moves over him, narrow bed, pink comforter, her belly taut under his fingers, her hands clutching his wrists. Seems like hours but he knows he can't last that long. Like this.

She hasn't finished, but she's not mad, she just takes the condom off and puts it in the trash bin beside the bed. She stays over him, lifts his hands from where they'd fallen to her thighs, and slides them between. Oh. Right.

After a while she changes her mind about that, she locks her ankles over his back and pushes up, up. Same softness and slick as her mouth, same snap and fuzzy tang, only. She twists a hand in his hair, her thumbnail digs in for a second, then it's gone as she reaches back for the headboard. Only one girl has ever asked for this before and he didn't think he was very good at it but she makes him feel like he has a gift and he's giving it to her. The combination. Two lips a tongue and, prudently applied, teeth.

Sounds like a hungry puppy, but god, puppies never—he shakes his head a little, not going to even finish that one. She pushes down, into his hands, he follows where she leads and on and on.

She comes, the sound of her wordless call and the whisper of her body next to his ear.

It is the most real thing he has ever done.

He lifts the comforter to his face and she laughs a little, shaky. She slides her feet down to the backs of his knees and tugs. He moves back up her body, turning on his side as she turns, moving one leg between his. One arm under his, palm cupping his shoulderblade, the other above his head. Awkward, feeling as cramped and enormous as he did in the car, he puts his hands around her back.

She sighs and closes her eyes. She glows in the white room. He feels enormous but in a good way.

So sleep, and when he wakes he's on his back, covered with the pink comforter and the smell of her skin rubbed off on his.

"Fucking god," she says. Sitting on the floor beside the bed.

She's naked and Bright tries very hard not to get turned on again.

"Stupidest thing," she says, crawling toward her dresser. Trying really really hard. Not looking there, not thinking about how good—

Bright is totally turned on. He bunches the comforter around his waist, blushing. Very embarrassed.

And she's talking. "—smalltown, stupid thing to do. Holy fuck."

She is pulling jeans from a drawer, and he recognises them from high school, and she is pulling them on without any underwear. Very turned on. She grabs a yellow t-shirt, blue writing he can't read across the chest, and pulls it on.

"I'm going to make coffee," she says. The efficient dismissal in her voice makes him a little less turned on. "My parents will be home in an hour. You can shower if you want, but you need to be gone when they get here."

She leaves the room. After a second he pushes the comforter off to the side and slides down to the end of the bed, feeling sticky and limp, reaching for his boxers and jeans.

She comes back in. "And I don't want to talk. I don't want you to talk."

He looks up at her. "Okay."

She goes again. He gets dressed and spends five minutes looking for his left shoe.

This time, when things go bad for Laynie Hart, she comes back to Everwood and does something stupid and smalltown. His name is Bright.

 

End.


End file.
